Quickly look up Vim help
In addition to the existing techniques for searching Vim help pages, such as the built-in :helpgrep and other grep techniques such as using external grep/id-utils, here is another technique that you can use to quickly lookup help topics. You are probably already aware that Vim creates tags to lookup help topics (using the :helptags command), and commands such as :tselect (or :ts in short) do work in the help windows (it is automatically scoped to only the tags files in your runtime doc directories). This other than providing a way to use familiar tag commands to lookup help topics (such as tag completion and using regex to lookup), allows us to take advantage of any tools that enhance the Vim built-in tag commands. I would like to show here one such tool that you can use. This requires the tagselect.vim plugin and its dependent plugins and . The plugin allows you execute a :tselect command and view the results in a new window. You can then use Vim's navigation (such as search) to find the tag you want and press Enter to jump to it. When used inside a help window, this naturally works on the help topics too. For example, say you want to view all the topics that have "shell" in their name. One way to do this is use tag completion :h shell and go one by one. But this is not easy as often you find tens, if not hundreds of matches for a keyword, so going through the list and using :tnext and :tprevious commands to navigate to other matching results is painful. But if you use the :Tselect command provided by the plugin, it becomes relatively simpler. :h :Tselect /.*shell.* The above gives you the full matching results for all the topics containing "shell" in their names. You can try other regular expressions (see ), but the above is probably the most useful, so you can create a command for it: :command! -nargs=+ -complete=tag Helpt :Tselect /.*.* You can put the above command definition in your vimrc. You can then say: :Helpt tag The best part of this is that you will discover topics that you overlooked several times, including any help topics for plugins. Comments I prefer the following: :he shell That will show a list help topics with 'shell' in the name. From there it is a simple matter to see which help topic you want. ---- You can search help without plugins: :helpgrep shell :copen I also use and it completely satisfies me. Could author give any real example which shows that using of that technique gives some noticeable advantages over ? ---- Using solution is unwieldy if there are too many hits (I also use this solution though I failed to mention this in my original post because does the same as for me as I have 'wildmode' set to "list:full"). Ok, here are the benefits I want to point out with the solution using tagselect.vim: *looking up the matching topic **with you need to do it visually (it is not that easy to do random searching using your eyes), **with tagselect.vim, you can use the vim search. *selecting a topic **with you need to back off the partial pattern ( or something like that) and retype the *exact* topic name that you looked up. **with tagselect.vim, you can just press Enter *Once you select a topic out of say, 100 matching topics, how would you look up and jump to another one? **with , you need to repeat the :h command with etc. **with tagselect.vim, you would use :Ts command (with no arguments) and repeat the search and select procedure. *Using tagselect.vim also allows you to view the filename to narrow down the topic you want. *Using :ts or :Ts allows you to specify any regular expression, but :h command always assumes substring. The above may not make sense to someone whose needs and usage patterns are different than mine, but I added the tip just in case someone is likely to find it useful as I did. For the other reader who pointed out the :helpgrep, I already mentioned using this command as an option. Using :cwindow is a good alternative to do search followed by :helpgrep, but this should usually show too many results, which may or not be better (and this shows the actual line as context too). ----